Plaza Playhouse Theater

4916 Carpinteria Avenue,

Carpinteria,
CA93013

The Plaza Playhouse Theater is operating as a non-profit community playhouse and has been since October of 2010. We offer classic movies, live theater and concerts of all kinds. The theater opened on April 27, 1928 as the Alcazar. Managed by Oliver “Ollie” Prickett, Hollywood character actor, who had a recurring role as “Geoduck”, the neighbor to Ma and Pa Kettle. Through the past 84 years, the theater changed hands and names and also fell into disrepair. Metropolitan Theater Corp. came in and performed an extensive remodel, but cancelled their lease in 2010 due to low revenue…Carpinteria is a small town, and Metropolitan simply couldn’t keep up with the studio required license fees. The Plaza Playhouse is currently managed by an all volunteer staff. Further details about the theater and our schedule can be found on our website at plazatheatercarpinteria.com.

90 years seems a bit old for a theatre in Carpenteria, which was a pretty small place for the first couple of decades of the 20th century, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it dated to the 1920s, when the development of local oil fields brought a sudden increase in the town’s wealth and population. The growing number of automobiles and improvement of the coast highway would have made Carpenteria more easily accessible to people from other, smaller towns along that stretch of coast about that time, too, making for a larger pool of theatre customers.

Major reconstruction witnessed this past week – they’ve gutted the place entirely and are shaping it up to be another theatre. Unsure if it’s first-run or revival or what, but one of the construction guys said that the theatre had been there for 90 years or more. While that may or may not have been hyperbole, it looks like it could’ve seated 500 or more; the walls are still decorated with cornices of some kind but it’s still too destroyed to make out any of its past architectural accoutrements without blueprints and / or some serious remote viewing.